IT WAS not without some pride that Indonesians awoke one November morning to find that their minister of communication had become a star performer in that American circus, “The Colbert Report”. Tifatul Sembiring had shaken Michelle Obama’s hand but felt terrifically embarrassed by it. In an apparent gesture of Islamic piety, the minister had warned against doing so during the White House visit to Jakarta. But then, either panicking or desiring to please, he had done precisely this—in a fawning, bowing manner. Later, mortified and repentant on Twitter, Mr Sembiring confessed that he “tried to prevent [being touched] but Mrs Michelle held her hands too far toward me, so we touched.” This sounds even more ludicrous in the Indonesian because Mr Sembiring says kena deh, which is what a Jakarta teenager might say if he brushed against you in a public bus.

Mr Sembiring is a national treasure. Serving within government but mostly marginalised from it, he has resorted to Twitter, where he tends to writes a half-dozen posts a day, ranging from the banal (“Each incident holds a lesson. Take the moral of the story and become wiser”) to the ridiculous (“The union between two children, when both of them complete each other, this is magic - Adolf Hitler”). Indonesia’s mostly-urban internet users have savaged Mr Sembiring, whom they regard as a bit of a buffoon. His Islamist party is allied with the governing coalition however and he retains support in more conservative quarters.

But this has been an excellent week for Mr Sembiring. His perennial crusade against pornography finally bore fruit as Research in Motion (RIM)—the Canadian manufacturer of the BlackBerry—agreed to adopt internet filters (after Mr Sembiring threatened to ban their local operations). Notably, none of his previous edicts against porn have been particularly successful. An ill-fated attempt to save Ramadan from internet sex resulted in an immortal New York Times headline: “Indonesia Finds Banning Pornography Is Difficult”. A baffled head of one internet service provider described a plan for a massive national filter as utterly unworkable—unlike China or India, Indonesia has no centralised web infrastructure and has multiple links to overseas networks.

Previous tweets from Mr Sembiring have blamed immoral television programmes for causing an earthquake in western Sumatra in 2009 (never mind that Indonesia lies across a series of fault-lines and has ever been prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions). One tweet, probably intended as a joke, broke down the acronym AIDS intoakitbatnya itunya dipakai sembarangan, or “what you get for sticking it just about anywhere”. Yet another of his posts blamed the spread of AIDS on “perverted sex acts”. Mr Sembiring is a member of the National AIDS Commission, so his views should bear some notice. It is unclear how his statements square with that role.

Not one to be left out, Mr Sembiring’s wife, Sri Rahayu, also made headlines this week when the Depok city council, where she is the deputy chair, passed a bylaw insisting that children must study between 6pm. and 8pm on weekday evenings. Not content to legislate diligence, the council also required that children study the history of the marshy suburb of Depok, though it is unclear exactly how much exists. (“There was once a bog...” would have to make the first page of such any Depok-history textbook.)

Are Tifatul Sembiring and his ilk part of Indonesia’s dangerous flirtation with illiberal ideas—or is he a success story in Indonesian democracy’s ability to engage people of vastly different opinions? The answer is probably closer to the latter. So far Mr Sembiring hasn’t been taken too seriously (President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is known to tolerate him, just), and if anything, his obvious ridiculousness unites liberal democrats like nothing else. He is also an entirely new creature on the Indonesian scene, someone who takes joy in spirited public argument and debate.

No consolation to RIM, which will have to spend vast sums retooling its network architecture to block media of people having sex. But the bigger story here is that a country that allowed virtually nothing in the way of public debate prior to 1997 now has a minister of communication who courts controversy actively and relishes the cut-and-thrust of public discourse.  As Vicky Vette, an American porn starlet, posted on Mr Sembiring’s Twitter-feed in response to the handshake debacle, “Come to the USA and shake anything you want”. For most political purposes however, Indonesians might just as well stay home.